As befits a man who arrived in Britain just two hours ago, Terry Reid’s dress mode is Californian. The tan is expat orange. Crumpled white shorts, red T-shirt and — because it was the first thing he found in his suitcase — a jacket orphaned from the rest of its suit.

Now 56, he’s not the sharply attired mod of his first publicity pictures, but the blue-eyed glare is unmistakeable. An hour into our rendez-vous, he’ll finally alight upon the one irreducible lesson that life has taught him:

“The trouble with record companies is that there’s always trouble with record companies.”

So amused is he by this summation that the ensuing laugh drowns out the sound of a plane taking off nearby.

Star quality never blossomed into stardom for Reid. However, for a brief period his prospects burnt brighter than those of almost any of his peers. “There are only three things happening in London: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Terry Reid,” said Aretha Franklin in 1969, while his high-voltage blues wail made him the first person Jimmy Page approached when looking to recruit a singer for his new band.

Touring commitments with the Stones, Cream and Jimi Hendrix prevented Reid from joining what became Led Zeppelin. But then, why would he have wanted to? With the hitmaker du jour Mickie Most having signed him to a deal, only good things were possible — or so it seemed.

But on returning from Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in Saint Tropez, Reid discovered that Most had mastered his second album, Bang Bang You’re Terry Reid, in his absence. “I told him where to stick his five-album deal,” Reid says, “which effectively put my career in limbo.”

Despite electing not to work with him any more, Most refused to release Reid from his contract. For the next three years, Reid’s live reputation sustained him.

By the time he appeared at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1971, Reid was in the process of relocating to America. But while his surroundings changed, his luck did not.

Despite having recorded a cover of his song Without Expression for their Zeitgeist-defining album Déjà Vu, Crosby Stills Nash & Young left it off at the last minute. He had been due to perform alongside them at the Woodstock festival in 1969, but a strike by US helicopter pilots left him in the Pan Am building watching it all on television with a forlorn Joni Mitchell, whose song Woodstock CSN&Y was covered on Déjà Vu. “It was poor Joni I felt sorry for,” contends Reid, his East Anglian burr softened by the years abroad. “She’s humming along, watching them do her song on TV.”

An afternoon in the company of Reid only serves to underscore the sense that you might be talking to the boomer-rock Zelig. That some of his more spectacular anecdotes might come with an element of lily-gilding is understandable. Bereft of gold discs to account for his place in the annals of rock, Reid has just a small but loyal following to argue his case.

It’s a case strengthened by the reissue in 2004 of what, in recent years, has come to be regarded as Reid’s masterpiece. As with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, Reid’s River (1973) is an album that seems to exist apart from its creator’s canon.

Listen to the three songs that comprise side one and you can hear a gradual cutting loose from Reid’s past — the Soho basements and provincial ballrooms — into the wide vistas of possibility. By the time the title track appears to float in on a Brazilian breeze, the leonine bluesman has swapped his earthly container for a place beyond mere happiness.

The critical re-evaluation accorded to River in recent years seems genuinely to have touched Reid. But he takes the compliments modestly, deflecting them in the direction of Atlantic Records’ co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, who bought Reid out of his contract with Most and suggested that he work with the soul producer Tom Dowd. “We were blown away, although, at the end of the sessions, when we played it to Ahmet he said: ‘I love it, but it’s a jazz album.’ He knew that he wasn’t going to be able to sell it to the record company.”

Still only 24 when River sank, Reid made two more albums in the late 1970s until no more deals were forthcoming. For Reid, the 1980s was a decade eked out with session work for California pals such as Don Henley and Jackson Browne. Then, in 1991, the Warner Brothers chairman Rob Dickens tracked Reid down and decided he would be the one finally to launch the singer chartwards.

His big idea — that Reid’s voice be let loose on the Waterboys’ 1985 single The Whole of the Moon — had promise. But, as the single left the pressing plant, the Waterboys’ original was enjoying a bizarre new lease of life as a rave anthem. By the time Reid’s version appeared, its creators were enjoying a Top Five hit with it.

What might seem like an extraordinary run of bad luck to some is, to Reid, nothing more than a salutary life lesson. His point — that “there’s a world of difference between making records and making music” — is worth lingering on. The argument that he could have been a Rod Stewart or a Joe Cocker had things gone his way is persuasive, until you remember just how many awful records his gravel-voiced contemporaries have made.

“It comes down to how you want to live,” says Reid. “I got to see my children grow up. And I never stopped playing.”

Indeed not. Before he moved out of town in 2004, to a golf course on the edges of the Californian desert, his Monday night residency at the Los Angeles restaurant The Joint attracted a cast of illustrious side musicians: the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, Graham Nash, Keith Richards.

Give or take a few celebrities, it’s essentially this show — a mix of old favourites, new tunes and well-chosen covers — that he brings to Britain this week. But then Reid has survived by doing what he has always been doing.

With Heathrow behind us, we negotiate a roundabout on which a model of Concorde remains perched. “If you told me in 1969 that I’d be going longer than that thing,” smiles Reid, “I would have been happy with that.”

Terry Reid plays the Cheese & Grain, Frome (01373 455420), tonight; Komedia, Brighton (01273 647100), on Monday; Robin 2, Bilston (01902 401211), on Tuesday; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen (01224 642230), on Sept 21; Dingwalls, London (08700 600100), on Sept 24